From Boccaccio to Boccacelli
A history of Albergo Montreal
Giles Walker - Lecturer in Italian, Pembroke College, Oxford (GB), 25th March 2004
- We have often been asked why our hotel is called Albergo Montreal...
- Perturbed by the stench coming from the first floor, Jean climbed the stairs...
- As the hermit grew older, so he realised that he needed assistance...
Perturbed by the stench coming from the first floor, Jean climbed the stairs, where he found the saintly hermit deep in prayer. Odours the pilgrim had never before experienced on all his travels floated inexorably into his nostrils from the hermit's feet.
As soon as the latter had finished his devotions, however, he listened patiently to the traveller's story and, filled with compassion, decided to take him in. Jean stayed for several days, visiting the many churches of Florence, and, over long hot evenings of endless conversations, formed a strong friendship with the hermit. Eventually they decided to build an inn on the site of the Monte Reale, to ease the hardships endured by future pilgrims. Jean was a skilled craftsman and worked quickly so that before the onset of winter, the first floor was complete. The hermit was so thrilled that he decided to name the inn Albergo Montreal in his honour.
On the night of Christmas Eve, Jean was also to place the numbers on the doors. Unfortunately, the lumberjack wandered into one of the excellent taverns of via San Gallo, where the patron, Roberto, introduced him to the delights of Chianti Classico, and Jean was somewhat less than sober when he returned. Anxious not to offend the hermit by declining his kindness, however, he insisted on putting up the numbers as planned.
This may explain why until last year the numbers on the doors read clockwise 2, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 9, 12, 11, 8, 22, 4. The epithet 'buono' was installed on the door of the tiny cell occupied by the hermit, and Jean set off after Christmas for Rome, promising to return in time to open the doors of the inn for the next season. The hermit vowed to wait for him, and remained patiently on his camp bed for over a hundred years. History does not relate what became of the pilgrim, although it is certain that he was not detained in Rome by that city's insipid white wines.
On 4th November 1966, as the waters of the Arno flooded into the ground floor of the palazzo, the hermit decided he could wait no longer, and he ventured out to rescue survivors of the flood. Afterwards he gave free accommodation to those made temporarily homeless by the disaster and, when they eventually left, he opened the doors of Albergo Montreal to travellers for the first time, so fulfilling a dream he had shared with a Canadian pilgrim so many years earlier.